The year in music
Britney grows up, the Strokes get the girls, Bob Dylan pencils a moustache and everyone is mad at the goddamn record industry! Why hype finally failed in 2001.
By Joey Sweeney
Dec. 26, 2001 | Five Spot -- a club that opened in Philadelphia at the height of the mid-'90s swing revival but has since had to pollute its retro identity with nu-soul, alt-rock and, most embarrassingly, bad house music on the weekends. We are packed in this club, like the Beastie Boys once said, like sardines in a tin.
And the couch we're sitting on is a gold mine of irony and voyeuristic thrills. Me and my friends -- a writer from Nylon, another guy from Magnet, a producer from NPR's "Fresh Air" -- are perched just outside the VIP Room, separated by just the flimsiest curtain of minuscule ball bearings from the party's guests of honor: the Strokes.
On our side of the velvet rope there is the usual shop talk, grousing, gossip and drinking. On the Strokes' side there is the music and the spirit and the life of youth, spurred on by a brand of rock 'n' roll -- obscenely lifted from the Velvet Underground and Television -- that stumps all of us when the question of its actual worth comes up. One thing is for sure in this foggy haze: There are girls literally lined up, literally begging to make out with any of the Strokes, a New York band of fashionable pretty boys who supposedly signify the return of everything that's supposed to be cool about rock.
Being children of the '90s, in the days before the rock pornography series "Backstage Sluts," back when musicians were ostensibly having the same girl problems as their fans, none of us have ever seen anything quite like it. Julian -- the one whose daddy owns the modeling agency -- has his tongue in some guy's ear; Fabrizzio (my favorite, and to prove this, I am drunkenly shouting his name in my thickest Dago accent: "heyyyyyyyy fab-REETZ-EE-o!") is nodding vacantly and staring into space as no less than five women talk to him at once; and the vaguely Swedish-looking one is sitting at his banquette, also -- you guessed it! -- staring into space.
Around them, hormones are raging, cellphones are exploding -- "Janet! I touched his ass! You have to get down here!" -- and we are all green-eyed, doing everything we can to stave off what will surely be our virulent hatred of the Strokes, due the second each of us catches himself in the bathroom mirror the next morning and realizes that -- fuck! shit! -- we are not them.
This was the color and shape of music hype in 2001: beer-bottle green and in the form of a heart-shaped box of chocolates, delivered by a lover who knows he doesn't stand a ghost of a chance.
But it's just that kind of hype -- desperate, sweaty and loaded with lies -- that was the order of the day in the music biz, 2001. And depending where you're sitting, its unmitigated failure was either a triumph or a tragedy.
Worse still, the year was hallmarked by an ennui that was, in most ways, not genre-specific. Even before Sept. 11, there were signs that nü metal was finally waning; after the tragedy, many pundits put forth that the music -- with all of its unjustified anger, put-upon sense of entitlement and willful self-obsession -- was rendered obsolete by noon on that fateful day.
Electronic music -- dance and otherwise -- continued on with a fantastic flaccidness. Daft Punk's long-awaited sophomore album came out, and even had a few great ahead-of-the-curve synth-revival tracks, but it was ultimately crushed under the weight of its own self-conscious over-ness. (That is, the state of feeling like their whole deal -- the funny French disco fills, the vocoded vocals, the fetishy sneakers, the Spike Jonze videos -- was just so 1998, so Internet boom-years, so ... over.) English house gods Basement Jaxx put out a fantastic flop in an even more extreme manner -- most people didn't even know the record came out. To the delight of about 137 people, out-sound experimentalists like Matmos plugged onward with the burgeoning form of clip-hop -- a hookless, beatless hybrid of musique concrete and the fast-forward button on your CD player -- and old heads like Stereolab managed to put out a serviceable album of "songs" that you could "hum" to. Even the best-selling, worst-sounding music under the electronica umbrella -- that brand of soul-sucking formulaic techno known as trance -- just staggered on, with Paul Oakenfold appearing every weekend at a club near you, a booking delighting no one but people two weeks away from rehab (or graduation). If I could draw the year in techno with emoticons, I think it'd look something like this: \/. (For all of you reading this on your cell phones, that's an arrow pointing downward.)
The blizzard of teen pop melted into a sweaty, nervous rain in much the same way. With Britney Spears angling for a Shania Twain-like adulthood that finally put fathers and their right hands at ease, and 'N Sync going all whiny and high-concept with "Pop" -- well, high-concept for "Total Request Live" viewers, at any rate -- teen pop heaved a heavy sigh that was the musical equivalent of the Freshman 15. And while the genre still proved that you can't kill off Swedes and marketing departments with just marriage and sex -- after all, who doesn't wanna bone the trashy one in Dream? -- the bubble unquestionably burst this year, the second Staind and Cold initiated the 20-years-too-soon revival of grunge.
And with it came Weezer, who always probably fancied themselves the poppy vaccine of the grunge era in the first place. After a year of touring and reintroducing themselves to the disenchanted 14-year-olds of the world, the band was cresting atop a wave of the best kind of publicity: the word of mouth of those self-same teens. And then they released the worst record of their career, their cute new bass player left and suddenly, it seemed like people weren't so crazy about Weezer anymore.
That was a shame, because in 2001, you didn't hear many songs on the radio that were filled with as much brutal angsty honesty ("Hash Pipe") or hope against hope ("Island in the Sun"). Hell, if you lived in a town dominated by megawatt radio and concert dillweeds Clear Channel, chances are, you probably didn't hear many songs at all. In the days after Sept. 11, some of the company's programmers issued a now-famous bonehead list of songs not to play -- including such disturbing numbers as John Lennon's "Imagine" -- for fear of letting music do the one thing that is still free: mean something.
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